The Cube That Keeps Coming Back: Ten Buildings, One Shape

The Kaaba in Mecca is close to a cube but not exactly one: 13.1 m high, 12.8 m long and 11.03 m wide. Pilgrims circle it seven times in the tawaf, and Muslims worldwide face it in prayer.

The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is not a cube at all. The body beneath the dome is an octagon, which is precisely why it is on this list: visual resemblance is not proof of a connection.

The black cube at Astor Place in New York, Tony Rosenthal's Alamo of 1967, turns on its axis. Rosenthal never intended it to.

La Grande Arche in Paris is a hollowed cube 110 m in every dimension. Its Danish architect, Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, died before it opened.

Rotterdam's cube houses, completed in 1984, are called Blaakse Bos in Dutch, the Blaak Forest: 38 small cubes and two supercubes, each tipped onto a corner.

The Cube in Birmingham is 23 storeys and contains a hotel. The Pyramid of Tirana was designed by Enver Hoxha's own daughter and reopened in 2023 as classrooms.

There are cubes in the world, and then there is the Kaaba. At the centre of Al-Masjid al-Haram stands one of the most recognisable structures on earth, wrapped in the black kiswah that identifies it instantly in any photograph.

But here geometry is far more than architecture. Muslims around the world turn towards the Kaaba in prayer, and during the Hajj and the Umrah pilgrims circle it seven times in the tawaf.

Looking down at thousands of people circling one geometric structure at the centre of an enormous space, you understand that the cube here is not only a shape. It is a centre. And that is our first clue: a cube has a clear inside and outside, clear boundaries, a clear middle.

Once you start hunting for cubes, it becomes very easy to start seeing them where they are not. That is exactly what happened to us in Jerusalem (opens in a new tab).

The Temple Mount is not a black cube, and neither is the Dome of the Rock: its central structure is an octagon, with a dome above it. So why is it on our route? Because of the geometry. Here you can watch basic forms take on meaning: square, octagon, circle, dome, symmetry and axes.

And it is an important point for the rest of the journey: visual resemblance is not proof of a historical connection. Perhaps we are simply drawn, again and again, to shapes that impose order on a disordered world.

At Astor Place (opens in a new tab) in Manhattan a genuinely black cube is waiting. It is called Alamo, but New Yorkers simply know it as The Cube. The artist Tony Rosenthal made it in Cor-Ten steel, eight feet along every edge, and it was installed here in 1967.

It balances on one of its corners, as though someone stopped it mid-fall. And then comes the fun part: a few people pushing together can send the steel mass turning on its axis.

And here is the best part: Rosenthal never meant it to spin. He said he had intended to set it on the post, turn it to the position he wanted and fix it there. It simply never was fixed. In Mecca it would never occur to us to treat the structure as an object to play with; here, touching the sculpture is part of the experience. The same shape, two meanings with almost nothing in common.

Paris (opens in a new tab) is full of buildings trying to make you look at them. La Grande Arche does something else: it makes you look through it.

At the end of the historical axis of Paris stands an enormous structure that looks like a cube whose centre has been cut clean out, roughly 110 metres high, wide and deep. The Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen won the competition in 1983 with an idea he called an open cube, a window on the world.

He never saw it open. Von Spreckelsen resigned from the project in 1986 and died a year later; Paul Andreu finished the work, and the arch was inaugurated in 1989. From a distance it looks simple. The closer you get, the more the scale registers, and people become small dots inside the frame.

The architect Piet Blom took one of the most basic shapes in architecture and did something almost cheeky to it. He turned it.

Rotterdam (opens in a new tab)'s cube houses were completed in 1984 and look like giant yellow cubes that landed on the city at an angle. Blom thought of each house as a tree and of the whole set as an urban forest, which is where the complex gets its Dutch name: Blaakse Bos, the Blaak Forest.

From outside it is photogenic. From inside it starts playing with your head: a wall is suddenly not necessarily vertical, a window turns up somewhere unexpected, and space you would normally read instantly demands to be thought through again.

Birmingham (opens in a new tab) decided not to get clever with the name: The Cube.

The building, 23 storeys designed by Ken Shuttleworth of Make Architects, leans on a contrast that exists in Birmingham itself: heavy industry and metalworking on one side, fine jewellery and watchmaking on the other. The facade carries some 20,000 anodised aluminium panels in gold, silver and bronze at three different depths, and at the top it opens into a glazed crown of sharp angles and asymmetric planes.

But it is not a monument. People work here, eat here, live here. And you can sleep here too. If this journey started with the question of where you can sleep next to a cube, here there is a better answer: inside one.

Halfway through the journey we decided to cheat and put in a pyramid. But there is a reason: the Pyramid of Tirana (opens in a new tab) proves that our story is not really about cubes. It is about the power we give to shapes.

It opened on 14 October 1988 as the Enver Hoxha Museum, three years after the ruler's death. It was designed by his own daughter, Pranvera, together with her husband Klement Kolaneci and two more architects. The museum closed three years later, when the regime fell.

And then the concrete simply stayed. It served as a temporary NATO base, then a nightclub, then nothing at all: walls for graffiti and an enormous slope to slide down. In 2023 it reopened after a renovation by the Dutch practice MVRDV. The concrete stayed; the story people tell about it was swapped out.

A few kilometres from the black cube at Astor Place stands a cube that is almost its opposite. On Fifth Avenue sits Apple's famous glass cube. It is transparent.

And the real architectural trick is underneath it: the cube is not the building, it is the entrance to the large space below street level.

If the black cube says I am here, the glass cube almost says look through me. At night, lit up with the city reflected in the glass, the boundary between object and street nearly vanishes.

You walk out of Berlin (opens in a new tab)'s central station, and opposite you stands something that looks, for a second, like a simple glass cube. Then you move a few metres, and the building changes.

cube berlin, completed in 2020 to a design by the Danish practice 3XN, is wrapped in an inwardly folded double-skin glass facade: 42.5 metres in every direction, ten storeys. The sky, the trains, the people and the surrounding buildings all become part of the elevation.

It is a cube that never quite lets you see it one way, and every angle produces a different picture. Perhaps that is exactly what twenty-first-century architecture does to the ancient cube: instead of using it to separate inside from outside, it makes the city reflect off the boundary between them.

After black, steel, glass and concrete comes something far quieter.

The Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden (opens in a new tab), designed by Richard Meier and opened in October 2004, uses clean geometric lines, white surfaces and glass to bring light and landscape into the building. Meier himself called it a jewel in the park.

It is not trying to be the mysterious cube, and that is exactly what makes it a good place to end. Because after all the places we have seen, it turns out our pull towards geometry does not have to be dramatic. Sometimes we simply like order.